Early propaganda cinema

When watching cinema, I generally view it for its messages and values rather than for its cinematography. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to elude it, as a film like Battleship Potemkin (1925) attests. It has astonishing moments, like the famed Odessa Steps steps scene illustrates, but its overriding message of the rise of the proletariat and the crushing of the bourgeois is truly stomach-turning. Also, while taking these segments out of the film and watching them individually are, no doubt, fascinating, viewing the entire film linearly is quite frustrating and its merit as a great piece of narrative is dubious. (I saw Eisenstein's October yesterday and, yet again, while many of its scenes are cinematographically spellbinding, viewing it was a real chore.)



It's not, generally speaking, solely propaganda cinema from this period that irritates me, a lot of silent cinema's messages from this period are very naive and amorphous. I recently saw the re-release of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and was fascinated by it, but its message of a 'mediator uniting the head and the heart' made me cringe indubitably and, despite Lang's fervid disassociation from the Third Reich, could be seen as a contribution to the ideology of Nazi Germany.

I guess one has to dispel these notions and accept all this as inherent to silent cinema because, as this was an extremely recent art-form and still in its evolving stages, it is bound to be incomplete and semantically ambiguous.

A scary thought about many propaganda films is the impact they had on audiences and the way they manipulated them. Audiences were far more impressionable in the early 20th century, and could be conned into an ideological belief with far greater ease. Hitler's rhetoric methods worked overwhelmingly well, for instance, and add to that the mere experience to going to the cinema (which was something overwhelming and new at the time), and swarms of people are attracted.

D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) distorted American history (in a similar way as Eisenstein did with Soviet history in October) to express vile racial politics and to glorify the Ku Klux Klan. Lasting more than three hours, it was the first feature film to receive vast public distribution and made an indelible impact on the public. The Ku Klux Klan had been inactive for decades, but resurfaced after the screenings of the film and garnered more members than it had in its previous inceptions. Once more, the film continues to receive praise to this day for its ground-breaking cinematography, but it is unthinkable not to bring its values into question and the terrible repercussions on the public.